To absolutely ensure maximum accessibility for your users, your website mark-up should be valid to the W3 guidelines. Using WordPress and multitudes of plugins that inject further code into your source can make that all very difficult.
Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed something about referrals: Google Images is very very valuable in attracting users to your website, and it’s equally much easier to get high rankings in the image search results than it is in native search results. The annoying thing about Google Images however, is the way it simply offers the image up to the viewer in a separate frame, making it easy for visitors to simply steal/view your image directly and leave again, never actually paying any attention to your site and potentially reducing your income if the site is monetised with advertisements, and removing any value to you of the visitor.
Aside from detecting visitors by their IP address, which I have covered in a previous post, you may also want to be able to detect what the referring website that you visitor has come from is, and react accordingly.
In the never-ending quest to reduce the amount of bandwidth your website uses (both to improve visitor load times and to keep your own overheads as low as possible), one of the simplest and easiest areas for improvement is often overlooked: compress your CSS and JavaScript.
Even just taking out all the erroneous white space can make a huge difference in the final size of the file. Of course, it annoys the hell out of people trying to digg through your code, but I sort of see that as an advantage too..! Of course, compressing your CSS and then having to revert back to an uncompressed version every time you want to make a change and re-compressing it again becomes a bit of a bore very quickly, so why not an automated method that will do it for you? With PHP and htaccess, it’s very, very easy.
Spam crawlers trawl the internet hopping from page to page, searching for unprotected email addresses in your source code. When they do find one, and even worse: if they do find your email address then you best hope you have good filtering because that email address will be squirrelled away and appear on thousands of spam mailing lists for literally years to come. I recently logged into an email account at HotPop that I abandoned almost five years ago just to discover that it was still being inundated with spam every day, even now.
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